Secondary Market

Out of curiosity, where are the secondary markets for pu-erh? I know that Taobao is significant, but I can't imagine that I'd find a lot of Essence of Tea or Yunnan Sourcing pressings on there. Where do people go if they're seeking sold out past productions from custom vendors like these...or puershop or Tea Urchin or whomever...

eBay has nothing. TeaTrade doesn't seem to cater to the puerh collector market. I don't see a lot of people swapping cakes here.

Who's the moneybags with the iron hands and clean warehouses that will finance such a marketplace?

Additionally, puerh tea has been subject to a marketing oriented (instead of government) Gresham's Law effect. The market is dominated by people selling crap to one another, with high prices for liquid acceptable items that aren't super-scarce, and anything that's honestly good and scarce goes straight into the hoard. There were plenty of BGTs made from 1999-whenever. They were good, but not spectacularly better than many other things. Same with the Bok Choy banzhangs from '00-'06. They tasted good, and enough people knew what they were like, and thus, they are fairly liquid. They also are hugely expensive, especially for the hedons. Then there are all the crap Dayi and Xiaguan to all the relatively poor who speculate a little or use for gifts. Regularly, some cache managers decide that a tea's ready to flog (Dayi Secret Fragrance and Changtai '03 Bulang has gotten a bit more attention just now in the Sinosphere), and posts start showing up about how good it is. Hopefully, for the speculators, a mania starts.

What I'm trying to get across here is that any accessible reseller will have high costs, and lots of need for expertise (because scammers will target you), and a great deal of effort would be needed to stock things that need little marketing help (or you can try it Puerhshop style, I suppose, what with 2oz sample packets and promotional sampling events, or something). It will be very difficult to buy *anything* worthwhile, given that puerh is a durable good, in such a way that you can buy low and sell high, for anything with a steady demand. I mean, are you going to find people selling '09, '10 Nadacha? '05, '06 XZH? Or are they going to just inquire among their tea friends and capture all of the price? There just aren't enough people into puerh in the West for anything to be liquid enough for consignment practices that's not dollar-store style.

... There just aren't enough people into puerh in the West for anything to be liquid enough for consignment practices that's not dollar-store style.

Well, then may be we should put more effort into spreading the pu gospel in the west. Imagine, if people binge drinking tea instead of binge drinking alcohol, many social problems would disappear over night. of cause, I'm dreaming ...

I mean, are you going to find people selling '09, '10 Nadacha? '05, '06 XZH?

Everything has a price, if someone willing to pay, say 10x or 20x or even crazy enough 100x of the original price, it would be very hard to resist. Only problem is where to draw a line.

I have a feeling that the skua was more interested in the idea of places to go for finding items from smaller boutiques, rather than the general topic of secondary markets that you guys seem to be focusing on... I could be wrong, but I'll go ahead and address the former.

Skua, i think part of the problem is volume -- those smaller vendors (Yunnan Sourcing, EoT, etc) generally do not produce more than a few hundred cakes of their teas, unlike the 100s of 1000s of larger tea companies. Sort of like mass-produced items versus artisan hand-crafted items, you'll find a lot less of the latter type from one individual.

Further, I get the sense that most "western" pu'erh drinkers are likely to retain their pu'erh. Many of us are in the hold-onto-it-and-age-it mindset. So that means once a smaller vendor is sold out, you're less likely to ever see it again.

Couple those two things together and I think it results in not much re-sale going on.

But finally, there's the problem of name recognition and venue. If I were to decide to sell my EoT 2011 Mannuo cake, I wouldn't stick it on eBay. It would get lost in the noise there. I'd visit tea circles (such as here, B&B, maybe even spread the word on blogs) and go that route.

So one possible solution -- various boards for other "collectibles" often have a section for members to post their trade list. A trade list is just that -- you generally have two sections: items you're looking for, and items you're willing to trade. Money trades (i.e. not a tea-for-tea swap) are usually acceptable, but generally people prefer to swap a "have" for a "want." In any case, the most important function for your swap-list is to advertise your wants.

Clearly the "TeaSwap" forum here could serve in that role, though I'm not sure how Chip would feel if suddenly 20 members created (and maintained) a swap-list. And of course if you have decent traffic on your blog, you could use that venue to advertise your trade-list as well.

Anyway, that's long enough. I hope that gets more to the root of your question.

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